2018-2019

GATEWAY COURSES

HIS-101 | European History from Renaissance to Revolution

Rudrangshu Mukherjee

(Spring, annually)

HIS-216 | History of India I: From Prehistoric Beginnings to the Mauryan Empire

Nayanjot Lahiri

(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)

This course aims to provide students with a sense of space, time and culture in ancient India. It looks at prehistoric hunter-gatherers, the advent of food producing societies, the cultures of interconnected differences (from the Harappan Civilization and its neighbours to the historical world of cities and states), and the landscape of empire. It will look at society and religion, art and architecture (and forms of patronage), women and their reintegration into the study of the early past, and the environment as a variable form part of the course so as to provide a rounded and nuanced perspective of ancient India.

Compulsory readings:

i. Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Medieval India, New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2008.

ii. Dilip K. Chakrabarti, India - An Archaeological History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 (second edition).

HIS-217 | History of India II: From the Mauryan Empire to c. 1000 CE

Upinder Singh

(Monsoon annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)

This course offers an overview of the history of the subcontinent from c. 200 BCE to 1000 CE, divided it into three phases: c. 200 BCE-300 CE, 300-600 CE and 600-1000 CE. Continuities and changes in political, social and economic structures and processes will be highlighted by focusing on issues such as class, caste, gender, agrarian relations, urban life and trade. Apart from Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Islam, the themes in religious history will include the age-old popular worship of snakes and yakshas and the pervasive influence of bhakti and tantra across religious boundaries. The emergence of regional configurations in politics, literary expression, and art and architecture in the early medieval period will be discussed. The course will also look at the many ways in which India was connected with other parts of the world across these centuries.

Compulsory readings:

i. Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Medieval India, New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2008.

ii. Aloka Parasher-Sen (ed.). Subordinate and Marginal Groups in Early India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

HIS-218 | History of India III: From c. 1000 CE to 1764 CE

Pratyay Nath

(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)

This course unravels the rich history of South Asia in the first eight centuries of the second millennium CE. It begins in the eleventh century, when the first Ghaznavid armies reached North India and Chola naval armies ravaged Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. It unravels the rise and fall of states and empires, including those of the Cholas, the Ghurids, the Mughals, the Marathas, the Vijayanagar monarchs, and the numerous sultanates. It closely studies the shifts and continuities in the domains of social relations, religious beliefs, and creative tendencies. It also explores the dynamics of the agricultural economy, manufacture and production, as well as overland and overseas trade. The course ends with the demise of Mughal power, which paved the way for the rise of smaller regional polities as well as the East India Company.

Compulsory readings:

i. Catherine B Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

ii. Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture, London: Reaktion Books, 2004.

HIS-219 | History of India IV: From 1764 CE to 1967 CE

Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Mahesh Rangarajan

(Spring annually, academic year 2018-2019 onward)

This course seeks to discuss some of the broad features of Indian history between the mid- eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. The first part, taught by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, will study the early British rule from the conquest of Bengal to the revolt of 1857. The post-1857 developments will be taught by Mahesh Rangarajan. This second section will take the story forward from the onset of Crown rule in 1858 to the early phase of the Indian Union till 1967. The consolidation of imperial rule and the revolts against it each had long term consequences for the ruler and ruled alike in a myriad ways, in socio-political, economic, and cultural as much as strategic terms. Interweaving different strands of life and attention to regional dimensions can help illuminate in many ways the India of today. Themes include the rise of new business groups, contested identities, the disparities between and across states and the challenges of crafting democracy in a climate of Cold War.

Compulsory readings:

i. Lakshmi Subramanian, History of India, 1707-1857, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010.

ii. Ishita Banerjee-Dube, A History of Modern India, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

CRITICAL THINKING SEMINAR

CT 218 | Animal Histories

Mahesh Rangarajan

(Cross-listed with Environmental Studies in Monsoon 2016; Monsoon 2017; cross-listed with Environmental Studies and History in Monsoon 2018)

CTS-157| Ideas and Emotions in Ancient India

Upinder Singh

(Spring 2019)

How did ancient Indians think about themselves and their place in the world? How did they describe the emotions they experienced? In this course, students will engage with the exciting world of ideas and emotions as revealed in ancient Indian texts. We will see how the Manusmriti describes the duties of the four classes and women, and think about whether people actually followed these rules. We will reflect on the different points of view about war in the inscriptions of Ashoka and in the Mahabharata and figure out whether ancient Indian kings were pacifists or war-mongers. We will encounter the various imaginings of the forest as a place of beauty, exile and danger. We will look at how material remains such as memorial stones tell us about practices related to death in ways that are very different from what the texts say. And we will read poetry composed by Tamil, Prakrit and Sanskrit poets (in translation) and reflect on how they describe love so differently. The course emphasizes the fact that ideas and emotions played as important a part in the lives of people who lived centuries ago, as they do in our own lives today.

CT-169 | Remembering and Forgetting: From Alexander to Gandhi.

Nayanjot Lahiri

(Spring 2019)

Course Description Unavailable

CT-111 | History, Novel and Cinema

Aparna Vaidik

(Spring 2016; Monsoon 2017; cross-listed as 200-Level History Elective in Spring 2018, Spring 2019)

CT-143 | Thinking through Buddhism

Sanjukta Datta

(Cross-listed as 300-Level History Elective in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)

READING COURSES

HIS-302 | Reading Archaeology

Sanjukta Datta

(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2018, offered every Monsoon)

HIS-301 | Reading History

Aparna Vaidik

(Spring 2016, Spring 2018, offered every Spring)

ELECTIVES

200 LEVEL

HIS-222 | War, Culture, Society

Aastha Singh and Pratyay Nath

(Summer 2019, cross-listed with Political Science and Sociology)

How have military techniques of human societies evolved over time? In what ways has war served as a contested site for defining gender roles? How have computer games, movies, and museums made war an object of popular consumption in modern societies? These are some of the questions that the present course grapples with. It offers a global history of the inter-relationship between warfare, politics, and society. In the first two weeks, we will study the evolution of military techniques from the prehistoric times to the twentieth century. In the third week, we will analyse the role of infrastructure – labour, logistics, animals, and resources – in war-making. In the fourth week, we will unravel the world of war-propaganda and anti-war protests. Next, we will delve into the realm of cultural representations of war. By focusing graphic novels, movies, photographs, letters, and computer games, we will explore the politics of representing war in popular culture. In the final week, we will study how societies have defined and contested ideals of masculinity and femininity against the backdrop of the real and prescribed gender roles for men and women in war. We will also look at issues of war-memory and war-trauma. The present course will study this rich history through a close reading of recent scholarly literature on the subject as well as a hands-on experience of analysing modern cultural representations (movies, graphic novels, and games) of war.

300 LEVEL

HIS 312 | History of Political Thought: Karl Marx

Rudrangshu Mukherjee

(Cross-listed with Political Science in Monsoon 2017, Monsoon 2018, Monsoon 2019)

HIS-306 | Introduction to Mughal History

Pratyay Nath

(Spring 2019)

Mughal emperors believed that they are the divinely-mandated rulers of the entire universe. This reflected in their imperial titles like Jahangir (Conqueror of the World), Shah Jahan (King of the World), and Alamgir (Conqueror of the Universe). However, how much power did they actually wield? How did they use paintings and built spaces to articulate their grand visions of power? What role did war, diplomacy, ideology, and religion play in the process of imperial expansion? These are some of the questions we will engage with in this course. It offers a comprehensive introduction to Mughal history and historiography. We will explore how the legacy of Chinghiz Khan and Amir Timur Gurgan – the Central Asian conqueror-ancestors of the Mughals – shaped their empire in South Asia. We will look into the ideals of masculinity that animated Mughal courtly etiquette and ask how much agency Mughal women had. We will investigate how the empire legitimised its rule, disciplined its elite, and created its fabled riches. Finally, we will study why such a huge and prosperous empire came crashing down in the eighteenth century. In the process, students will get a chance to work with some of the primary textual, visual, and material sources of Mughal history.

HIS-327 | Querying the Early Medieval

Sanjukta Dutta

(Spring 2019, 2020)

The period between c.600-1300 CE is considered to be a distinct stage in Indian history and is labelled the early medieval. In conventional categorization of Indian history into ancient, medieval and modern, the early medieval connects the ancient to the medieval. So what constitutes early in the early medieval? Why is the early medieval not followed by the late medieval? Through questions such as these the course examines issues of periodization and classification of temporal units.

The rich historiography of the early medieval period straddles theoretical models of pan-Indian political processes as well as studies of regional formations. Some of the exciting themes that will be explored include the flowering of regional identities through language, literature, art and architecture; the growth and decline of major Indic religions; expanding networks between the subcontinent and the rest of Asia through military campaigns, trade and pilgrimage. For students of history, the emergence of genres of history writing such as the royal biography is of particular interest.

HIS-318 | Tarzan and Mowgli: A History of Colonial Culture

Aparna Vaidik

(Monsoon 2018 and Monsoon 2019)

Tarzan of the Apes (1912), embodies the popular twentieth-century imagination of Africa as a land of primeval forests, abode of apes and pygmies shooting poison-tipped arrows under the benign protection of a white man. The jungle of Africa as imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan (who incidentally never set foot in Africa), was influenced among other things by Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book and the man-cub Mowgli's capers (1894). Translated into several languages, these allegorical tales of British empire in Africa and India filtered into popular consciousness through comics and cinematic reproductions. Tarzan's and Mowgli's adventures became the most enduring globally-circulating images of interaction between white men with the non-white world. These stories open a door into the cultural world of colonial India, Africa and Britain. Through them the course explores the different ways in which the colonizer and the colonized engaged with the ‘Other’ and, in doing so, reconstituted each other. This cultural dialogue was evident, as the students will discover, in the way colonialism sought to colonize the mind, body, history, culture, geography and the aesthetic sensibilities of the people of Empire, and also in the way it reconfigured the British sense of nationhood. The course will examine these themes in depth to bring to fore the ‘experience’ of the Raj – what it meant to be a colonizer and to be colonized.

Note: Students who have done ‘Kipling’s India’ cannot take this course.

HIS-319 | War in the Early Modern World

Pratyay Nath

(Monsoon 2018)

The increasing use of firearms transformed European warfare in the late-15th and early-16th centuries. As Spanish and French siege artillery demolished Moorish and Italian fortifications respectively, architects and engineers all over Europe scrambled to come up with novel designs for fortresses that would neutralised the threat posed by artillery-fire. On the field, massed formations of handgun-bearing infantry challenged the supremacy of the medieval mounted knights. Meanwhile, in West Asia, the Ottomans organised their own corps of enslaved musketeers called janissaries. Along with advanced artillery, these janissaries enabled the Ottomans to destroy the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and to conquer their way into Eastern and Central Europe by bringing their troops and ships up the Danube River. In the Far East, the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese vied for regional supremacy. In the 1590s, they engaged in what has been called the ‘first great East Asian war’ in the Korean peninsula. In West Africa, Iran, and South Asia, military processes were more complicated, but eventually led to the rise of strong states and stables empires. Finally, military might helped Western European powers achieve important victories and conduct large-scale genocides in their new conquests in both the Old and New Worlds. The sea became increasingly politicised and militarised across the globe. During this entire period, huge changes also swept the fields of military logistics. Empires found increasingly sophisticated political ideologies to legitimise their military violence. Increasing military expenditure gave rise to fiscal-military states equipped to meet the new demands of escalating global violence. The present course unravels this global military history of the early modern times using a comparative analytical approach.

HIS-320 | Historicizing Ancient Indian Texts

Upinder Singh

(Monsoon 2018)

What do Rigvedic hymns reveal about the world of the Indo-Aryans? How can we understand the contradictions and silences of the Manusmriti? What do Tamil poems of love and war reveal about early historic South India? Did Kautilya’s state exist only in his imagination? Why were animal stories chosen to teach crafty cunning as well as pious morality? Can the Mahabharata and Ramayana be considered as history and why did they become so popular in India and Southeast Asia?This course will answer such questions by introducing students to the exciting variety, richness and complexities of ancient Indian texts, by focusing on a few important texts and explaining how they can be read not only as windows into the past but also as important parts of the past, with an impact that in some cases extends into our own time.

HIS-321 | World Religions: Texts and Contexts

Sanjukta Datta

(Monsoon 2018)

Religion has been an integral component of human societies across time and space but the study of religion as an academic discipline is a relatively recent phenomenon. This course provides an overview of the key historical developments in some of the major religions of the world such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and the ways they have come to be studied by scholars of history and archaeology. In this journey, we will encounter foundational texts, the cult of relics, expanding pilgrimage networks, resplendent art and architecture, and competitive claims over religious sites. One of the highlights of the course will be the understanding of religion’s protean character that adapts itself to specific historical circumstances, at times resulting in significant divergences between precept and practice.

HIS-332 | Religion, Politics and Literature in North India

Purushottam Agrawal

(Summer 2019, cross-listed with English)

The period between 1922 and 1947 is very significant for the study of sharpening of communal divide and articulation of Hindu and Muslim ‘nationalism’. The failure of ‘Khilafat’ movement led to virtual withdrawal of Muslims from the INC led national movement and eruption of communal violence. The basic text of political Hindutva (‘Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?’) by V.D. Savarkar was published in this period. (1923 and 1928). RSS was established in 1925. On the other hand, Muslim League got a new lease of life and propagated the ‘two nation theory’. This course will seek to explore the individual and institutional literary response to this transformation of the traditional religious identity into a ‘modern’ political one. It is interesting to see that it was during this period that Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s ‘Padmavat’; academically edited collections of Kabir and Gorakhnath’s poems were published and the other hand ‘Gita Press’ was established with avowed intention of ‘protecting the Sanatana Dharma’. Urdu public sphere also, on the one hand, we see great energy and activity for the separate Muslim political/ national identity, and on the other hand spread of ‘progressive’ trends in Urdu literature. The publication of Angare (collection of short stories, 1932) is considered a landmark event in the history of Urdu literature. The literary world of both Hindi and Urdu was apparently abuzz with democratic ideas, (PWA was established in 1936 and IPTA in 1943), but was it really able to influence the larger public sphere? The collective, cultural memories play a major role in construction of any identity, in what ways these memories were being articulated in literature? how the religious community, its cultural contours and its history were being imagined in larger public sphere and what were the literary reflections on it? These are important historical questions with deep bearing on the contemporary Indian social and political scene. The proposed course will explore these questions. Many of the important literary texts from the period covered in this course are available in English translations.

400 LEVEL

HIS-413/HIS-4801 | Museums in South Asia: History and Politics

Kanika Singh

(Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)

INDEPENDENT STUDY MODULES

HIS-399-6 | War and Empire in Central Eurasia, 1000-1800

Pratyay Nath

(Spring 2019)

Throughout history, Central Asian nomadic warriors have been feared by sedentary states as the most brutal and invincible conquerors. In the fifth century CE, Attila led the Huns to ravage much of Europe and hasten the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. Around the turn of the first millennium CE, Turkish dynasties like the Ghaznavids and the Saljuqs embarked on a wave of territorial conquests under the new-found banner of Islam. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols under Chinghiz Khan and his descendants carved out one of the largest empires the world has ever seen. At its peak, the Mongol empire embraced all of Central Eurasia, China, Iran, and much of West Asia. This was followed by another violent and spectacular, if short-lived, empire in the fifteenth century – that of the Turkish conqueror Amir Timur Gurgan. In the early modern times, Central Asian post-nomadic warrior groups – the Ottomans, the Timurids, the Muscovites, the Uzbegs, and the Manchus – founded some of the richest and strongest empires of the world. The present course unravels this rich history through the categories of war, conquest, empire, ideology, and the royal hunt. It begins with the emergence of Turkish sultanates around the onset of the second millennium CE and closes with the imperialist race between Muscovite Russia and Qing China to conquer Central Asia in the eighteenth century.

HIS-399-7 | Space and Cartography in the Early Modern World

Pratyay Nath

(Monsoon 2018)

Early modernity (c. 1500-c. 1800) ushered in an era when human societies started thinking of the space around them in significantly different ways as compared to earlier times. Western Europe underwent a whole cartographic revolution. Here, the geographical explorations of people like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan triggered a complete transformation in the way people made maps and conceptualised the layout of the world. Cartographers like Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius created the first modern atlases and devised ways of projecting a newly-discovered round global space onto two-dimensional images. Maps also increasingly emerged as vehicles for the expression of imperial power across the world. The Ottoman, Muscovite, and Manchu emperors commissioned elaborate cartographic ventures to map the territories that they ruled as well as that they aspired to rule. Mughal emperors appropriated European maps and globes in their allegory paintings to bolster their claims to world domination. In Japan, a whole economy of various kinds of maps emerged around this time to cater to political, economic, cultural, and religious interests. Adopting a global comparative approach, the present ISM unravels this fascinating history of the production, circulation, and consumption of these newer ways of making maps and thinking about space.

CROSS LISTED COURSES FROM OTHER DEPARTMENTS

HIS-410/VA-202 | Understanding Art

Janice Erica Pariat

(Spring 2018, Monsoon 2018; Visual Arts course cross-listed with History)

VA-205/HIS-328 | Sites and Sights: Museums, Exhibitions and the Making of Art.

Sraman Mukherjee

(Spring 2019, Spring 2020)

Elective Course in Visual Arts. Course Open for Credit and Audit for students enrolled in other disciplines.

What is Art and how do sites and spaces of encounter with the visual image condition our understanding of works of art? Seeking answers to these fundamental questions in art history and visual culture, this course brings in dialogue the works of art with the spaces that such works have come to inhabit in our present world – museums, art galleries, and other spaces of visual exhibitions. Moving beyond the established trajectories of looking at exhibitions, museums, and gallery spaces as safe storehouses of masterpieces of Art, or merely as spaces of ordering, classifying, and displaying objects and images, we will look closely at how exhibitionary practices of the museums and public art galleries, constitute the very category Art around a select body of objects and images. Beginning with early modern royal and notable private collections, and cabinet of curiosities across the world, the course will explore the specific moments of the coming into being of public museums and art galleries, freak shows and world exhibitions in Europe and across different parts of the world. With a specific focus on Asia, the course will map the connected global trajectories of art museums, art galleries and art fairs as diverse ways of engaging with the visual image. In the process it will highlight the role of the artists, curators, and museum/ gallery visitors in the production of a complex set of dialogues around artistic and curatorial visions. The course will end by looking at contemporary South Asia, mapping the challenges of redesigning exhibitionary orders of older museums and art institutions and spread of museum display modes for different intent in commemorative sites, theme parks, memorials, and new temples.This co-constitution of art and art museums will be addressed during class discussions and during visits to local galleries, museums, theme parks, and temples.

IR-306/HIS-329 | Clausewitz: Ideas and Influence.

Srinath Raghavan

(Spring 2019)

Carl von Clausewitz is widely regarded as the most profound and influential thinker on war. Yet the discipline of International Relations has rarely engaged with his ideas on their own terms. This course offers a close engagement with Clausewitz's famous (yet rarely read) text On War. It will situate the book in its historical and intellectual context, and consider a series of translations and commentaries. The course will also trace the reception and appropriation of Clausewitz's ideas from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. There will be a cap of 15 students for this course.

POL-217/HIS-330 | Western Political Thought II.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta & Sandipto Dasgupta

(Spring 2019)

Course Description unavailable

ENG-314/HIS-331 | Seminar in Indian Literatures: Dalit Writing.

Rita Kothari

(Spring 2019)

What is caste, and how does the literary imagination in India respond to it, concealing, foregrounding and contesting its rigid structures? These questions form the fulcrum of this seminar. The course will include an array of material from poetry, autobiographies, audio-visual narratives, fiction as well as sociological and political essays on caste

ENG-501/HIS-414| Seminar in Medieval Studies: Global Medieval Women’s Writing.

Alexandra Verini

(Spring 2019)

Course Description: Unavailable

POL-201/HIS-322 | Introduction to Western Political Thought

Pratap Bhanu Mehta & Sandipto Dasgupta

(Monsoon 2018)

This course is a collective inquiry into the ideas that have helped shape our political world. We will explore a series of texts from antiquity to the contemporary period concerned with the political, ethical, and social dimensions of human existence. We will cover Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, amongst other thinkers.

Note: This course will be offered in two parts. The first part will be offered in Monsoon. It will discuss the period from classical antiquity to the eighteenth century. The second part will be offered in Spring. It will deal with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both the parts will be cross-listed with History. Students could choose to take either or both of the courses. Taking either of the parts without taking the other is not a problem.

VA-3002/ HIS-323 | Empire, Nation, and Art: Histories from the Visual Image

Sraman Mukherjee

(Monsoon 2018; Spring 2020)

How would histories look from the perspective of visual images? Do visual images help us to uncover alternate histories of that remain otherwise untraceable in textual sources and archives? What are the potentials of visual images in domain of historical research? What are the boundaries between images and texts, art and “non-art”? How far are the distinctions between the textual and the visual tenable in the field of historical studies? How are our ways of seeing shaped by social conditioning and cultural norms? Seeking to address these questions this course looks at the global social formations from the fifteenth century of Common Era to our present times through the prism of visual images. We specifically focus on the centrality of visual archives in exploring histories of European colonialism under Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires. The course will address a range of colonial formations and diverse articulations of nationalist thought and consciousness in different parts of the world through different visual forms across a range of media, sites, and objects. Beginning from academic realism and naturalist paintings and drawings of unknown landscapes and oceans, paintings of birds and beats, of unknown humans and exotic objects, mediums and technologies of visual (re)productions like lithographs, oleographs, chromolithographs, aquatints, photographs and the moving image, to sites of visual simulations like world exhibitions, cabinet de curiosities, metropolitan, colonial, and postcolonial public museums, art galleries, institutes of pedagogical training in visual arts, crafts and design, the course argues that global histories of colonialism, nationalism, and decolonization are partially histories of encounters, violent conflicts, tortuous negotiations, and often uneasy accommodations played out at the register of the visual image. The course urges us to rethink that notions of metropolis and colony, empire and nation, centre and periphery, colonizer and colonized, alien and indigenous, as they are configured and reconfigured in the archives of the visual image, are historically relative, fluid categories, having only situational relevance. Moving away from a purely Euro-centric discussion of the beginnings of Art and Art History, this course moves towards a Global Art History.